I gotta say this is an interesting suggestion and it would be good to see happen.
First though off, this would need to be free. Are you suggesting that it could be a free download or that individual USB drives with the OS pre-installed would be sold?
Second, what architectures should be supported? Obviously x86 would need to be supported as the vast majority of computers use this architecture what about other architectures. if itchOS had ARM support for example then would make it a highly versatile system as it would be able to run on many other things such as the Raspberry Pi (or similar boards.) A mobile version of the OS would also be possible but this is probably overthinking things a bit.